One quip about an electric car being sarcastically referred to as "gay" in the new Ron Howard comedy The Dilemma is causing a major flap in the film industry. The gay rights group GLAAD persuaded Universal to cut the line from its trailer for the movie, saying it reflects negatively on a minority. However, Ron Howard has refused to go a step further and remove the line from the actual film. Howard is an unlikely target for such criticisms, as his liberal leanings are well-known. He says in no way endorses gay-bashing but draws the line at bending to censorship from activist groups, saying that doing so would lead to a slippery slope with major implications for filmmakers. GLAAD says it isn't being thin-skinned, but is trying to make audiences more sensitive to gay rights in the wake of several high profile crimes against homosexuals. Is Howard being insensitive or is GLAAD making a mountain out of a molehill? Judge for yourself by clicking here to read the full story.

Reader Eddie Love advises us that Blake Edwards' Gunn, a big screen adaptation of the TV series Peter Gunn starring Craig Stevens, is now available on Netflix as a digital download - albeit as a "pan-and-scan" print with French titles! Better than nothing, but we wonder if this title will ever get a "proper" DVD or digital download release.

Odeon
Entertainment are continuing their quest to bring a mixture of sought after and
totally obscure titles to DVD with generous extras here in the UK.

Goodbye Gemini (1970) stars
Martin Potter and Judy Geeson as twins in a complicated and suspiciously
incestuous relationship. They are 20 years old but they roam and play in their
large Chelsea townhouse like children, and what begins as childish pranks
escalate into something seriously disturbed. At that time Potter was fresh from
his success in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969)
whilst Geeson had made a big impression as a promiscuous schoolgirl in To Sir With Love (1967), and in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968),
espousing free love whilst skinny-dipping in a lake. Goodbye Gemini was directed by Alan Gibson shortly before he made
two Dracula films for Hammer. With his name attached, along with a supporting
cast including former Frankenstein’s monster Freddie Jones one might expect the
film to be a horror, but it’s not as easy to pigeonhole as that. The film could
more accurately be described as a psychological thriller, set in the tail-end
of the 1960s where post-Altamont and Charles Manson, the hippy dream has well
and truly gone sour. It’s a fascinating and terrifying film that crosses sexual
boundaries and pushes relationships over the edge. When we spoke to Martin
Potter he remembered the film well: “As an actor I was trained to tell truth. In
Goodbye Gemini there was this awful
scene where I was about to gas myself, having done something truly awful. There
was Hammer horror, where as an audience you didn’t expect Christopher Lee or
anyone else to explain what they were doing. It was just a genre of film. But I
do recall with Goodbye Gemini trying,
probably incredibly naively, to explain what this person was doing. I took it
all terribly seriously. I was trying to make it real for me. Whereas the
director was doing the film to pay off his mortgage!”

Goodbye Gemini is
based on the 1964 novel Ask Agamemnon and features a great period soundtrack by
first time composer Christopher Gunning, who would go on to score dozens of TV
series and films, including the recent Oscar-winning La Vie En Rose (2007). There would appear to be very little
commercial appeal in this story of a brother and sister who love and kill
together, but thankfully this was a time of risk-taking and experimentation in
the British industry. They were even able to bring Sir Michael Redgrave on
board in a significant role as a politician who spends his evenings attending
the wrong kind of parties.